Historic Markers in Texas

Montgomery, TX

Built in 1854 for merchant R.S. Willis by craftsman J.E. Shelton, this antebellum Texas home was assembled with hand-planed siding and a pegged-and-morticed frame — the careful joinery of a pre-industrial builder. It was restored in 1965 by the Waldrop family, who named it "Cathalorri" for their two granddaughters. The house was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1966.

Galveston, TX

This marker honors Catherine Isabel Cox Sherman, born in 1815 and died in January 1865, the wife of General Sidney Sherman—a leader of the Texas Revolution long credited with the rallying cry 'Remember the Alamo.' Her life spanned the birth of the Texas Republic and the years of the Civil War. As with many women of her era, her story survives chiefly through her ties to a prominent husband and family.

Leakey, TX

On April 19, 1881, a Lipan Apache band raided the Frio Canyon home of 'Kate' McLauren while she was there with her three small children and a neighbor boy. Shot during the attack, she still managed to send her six-year-old daughter for help before dying that night after her husband's return. When a cemetery was established at Leakey, she and the boy killed in the raid were among its first burials, in what is remembered as the last Indian raid in the canyon.

Klein, TX

Catherine Hofius immigrated from Prussia in 1852 at age 21, settling among the many German families of this part of Harris County and marrying Peter Wunderlich soon after. Widowed in 1864 when Peter died in a gunpowder-mill accident, she managed the family farm alone, raised six young children, bought more land in 1866, and added sheep and cattle to the operation. A founding member of Trinity Lutheran Church, she lived in the Klein community until her death in 1904.

Liberty, TX

In 1853, Father Petrus Marie LaCour — a native of France and the first pastor of Liberty's Immaculate Conception parish — bought this ground as a burial place for the county's Catholic settlers. Many of the earliest graves belong to French Creole families who had migrated from Louisiana, names like LaCour, Baillio, DeBlanc, and Fortier that would shape Liberty's business, civic, and religious life. It remains the oldest Catholic cemetery in Liberty County.

Goliad, TX

When Spain entered the American Revolution against Britain in 1779, Bernardo de Gálvez went to New Orleans to raise an army—and remembered the wild cattle of the Texas country where he had once been stationed. At his request the Spanish governor of Texas rounded up some 10,000 head from the missions and ranches, assembling them at Presidio La Bahía. Driven east between 1779 and 1782 to feed Gálvez's Gulf Coast campaign, this is regarded as the first major Texas cattle drive.

Corpus Christi, TX

By 1840 tens of thousands of wild longhorns roamed the brush country between the Rio Grande and the Gulf, so plentiful they were nearly worthless to the Texans who owned them. Ranchers began trailing small herds toward distant markets — New Orleans, Missouri, Ohio, even California and Chicago — but the real boom came after the Civil War, when hungry Northern cities and advancing railroads finally made the long drives pay. Feeder trails near here fed the great Chisholm and Dodge City routes to the Kansas railheads, and by 1880 some four million head had gone up the trail.

Graham, TX

Under this oak near Graham in February 1877, forty cattlemen banded together to form the Cattle Raisers Association of Texas, choosing their first officers on the open range. In an era of unbranded strays, rustling, and the great trail drives, the group organized ranchers to protect their herds and their interests. By 1936 the association counted some 2,500 members.

Decatur, TX

Near this Wise County site ran a feeder branch of the Chisholm Trail, the most famous of the routes that funneled Texas cattle toward the hungry markets of the North. The main trail was blazed in 1865 by Jesse Chisholm, a trader of Scottish and Cherokee descent, and drovers soon extended its branches from the Rio Grande up to the Red River, passing fixed fords like the Trinity crossing at Fort Worth. By the 1890s barbed wire, railroads, and tick quarantines had ended the great drives, but not before the trail helped rebuild a Texas economy wrecked by the Civil War.

Dublin vicinity, TX

Once called South Bolton Cemetery, this Erath County burial ground holds its earliest marked grave from 1879, from the years the Franks family owned the land. The Caudle family bought the property in 1883, and matriarch Rebecca Clayton Caudle was buried here in 1886. Among the poignant stories is Fannie Caudle, who died on her wedding day in 1895 and was laid to rest in her bridal dress; descendants rediscovered and restored the neglected cemetery in 1997.

Brownsville, TX

Fannie Seward Cavazos left Ohio during the Civil War, living briefly in Bagdad, Mexico, before settling in Brownsville in 1870 with her husband Wenceslao. Widowed in 1882, she built a successful business in Mexican-style drawnwork lace and helped establish the town's Mexican Presbyterian Church. In 1905 her daughters built her this Late Victorian cottage, notable for its decorative woodwork.

Bryan, TX

Attorney William R. Cavitt bought this city block in 1875, the year he married Mary Mitchell, and around 1880 the couple built a brick Italianate residence here. Cavitt served as Brazos County Attorney, later as a state legislator, and on the board of Texas A&M University. The Cavitts remodeled the home in the 1920s in the Colonial Revival style, and it stayed in the family until 1978.

Madisonville, TX

Camp Sam Houston, opened near Madisonville in 1935, was a soil-conservation unit of the New Deal's Civilian Conservation Corps, giving work to 196 men in the depths of the Great Depression. Its members ranged across Madison and neighboring counties, teaching farmers and ranchers erosion control and pasture management within a 21-mile radius. The camp closed in 1941 as the nation turned toward war.

Mesquite, TX

During the Great Depression, farmer Hicks Jobson set aside eight acres near Mesquite so the Civilian Conservation Corps — one of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal work-relief programs — could establish a camp. From June 1935, Company 850's 250 enrollees lived in a small city of barracks, a mess hall, and a bath house while working with more than 300 area farmers on soil conservation across 40,000 acres. Their terracing, fencing, check dams, and levees along the Trinity River continued until 1941, after which the land was donated to the local school district.

Friendswood, TX

Designed by Houston architect Henry A. Stubee and built in 1938, this French eclectic house was the home of civic and business leader Cecil Brown and his wife Frances, both from pioneer Quaker families. Brown was prominent in the Gulf Coast fig industry that flourished from the 1920s to the 1950s and is credited with much of Friendswood's development. For years it was the only brick residence in the area.

Baytown, TX

Chartered in 1870 with thirteen members, this Masonic lodge built its own hall in 1876 and gave over part of it to house the first public school in east Harris County. In 1879 it launched an annual barbecue that became a lasting community tradition, and over its first century the lodge missed only a single scheduled meeting. As the area boomed, the lodge steadied community life and helped organize new lodges at Goose Creek and Anahuac.

Baytown, TX

This Methodist congregation took shape in 1844, when Texas was still an independent republic, gathering first in the home of an early settler under a traveling frontier missionary. Within a few years its worshipers raised a log sanctuary and made the church a hub of the small Cedar Bayou community, complete with summer camp meetings on the grounds. From an early emphasis on Sunday School, the congregation grew into a supplier of teachers and religious literature to neighboring settlements.

Houston County, TX

Cedar Branch grew from an extraordinary act at the close of slavery: a planter couple deeded parcels of their own cotton plantation to each of their former slaves, who built a community on the land. The freedmen organized a church in 1862 and raised a sanctuary in 1864, and by 1888 a school met in the church building—the church remaining the community's heart to this day.

Grapeland, TX

Schooling at Cedar Branch dates to at least 1888, and in 1895 the local church donated its old sanctuary to serve as a schoolhouse. By 1911 the settlement was its own common-school district, and a two-room school later rose on this site with help from the Julius Rosenwald Fund, the philanthropy famous for financing schools for African-American children across the rural South. The school anchored the community until it consolidated with Grapeland in 1952.

LaGrange, TX

The Lewis family settled the La Grange area in the 1830s and set aside this ground as a family burial place, where the earliest marked grave dates to 1857. German immigrants left a deep imprint here—records were kept in German until 1931 and their culture is carved into many of the tombstones. Renamed several times as it grew into a community cemetery, it holds veterans of every American conflict from Texas independence through the Korean War.

Austin, TX

After Texas won independence in 1836, settlers drawn by timber and Brushy Creek's water carved farms and ranches from the land that became Williamson County in 1848. Beyond cotton and livestock, families harvested the ashe juniper they called cedar—cutting fence posts, roof shingles, telephone poles, and charcoal, and shipping cedar rail ties once four rail lines crossed the county. The itinerant 'cedar choppers' who moved camp to camp, including one leased here in 1905–08, became a defining local trade well into the twentieth century.

Muldoon, TX

Around 1875, the African American community of Cedar Creek laid out this burial ground behind the church built by their African Methodist Episcopal congregation, organized in 1874 on land from the estate of N. W. Faison. The earliest known grave dates to 1877, and among the markers are striking folk creations—one shaped like a concrete ball, another of petrified wood, and several studded with seashells. The church served for more than half a century, and today the cemetery is all that remains of the Cedar Creek community.

Chappell Hill, TX

Cedar Creek was a Methodist settlement that thrived between the mid-1830s and early 1850s, halfway between San Felipe de Austin and the town of Washington, and became a center of the Texas Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1849 its residents founded nearby Chappell Hill, which grew into the hub of Methodism in central Texas as the older community faded into it. By the end of the Civil War the site had reverted to farmland, and today only rocks around the community spring remain.

Abilene, TX

First called Coates for early settler Kem Coates, the Cedar Gap community took shape in the late 1800s as families from Robertson County put down roots, organized a Baptist church, and opened a school. Transportation made the town: a stagecoach pike ran south from Abilene toward Content, and in 1909 the Abilene & Southern Railway pushed through on its way to San Angelo, its frame waiting station and construction jobs drawing more residents. A blacksmith, general store, cotton gin, and lodge rounded out its life before the school consolidated away in 1948 and the community faded to a cemetery.

Carthage, TX

Soon after the Civil War, settlers founded a community here and named it Snap for a local physician, Snap Cariker. In 1905 members of the nearby Six Mile Church organized under the Rev. W.A. Reagan, built their own sanctuary by 1912, and took the name Cedar Grove Baptist Church. While the farming village of Snap declined after World War II, the congregation kept growing, adding a full-time pastorate in 1951 and new facilities as it passed its centennial.

Milam, TX

Established around 1890 on land granted in 1830, Cedar Grove was among the first African American Baptist churches in Sabine County. After moving to its present location in 1904, the congregation's building doubled as a school for Black students by 1915, making it a cornerstone of education and community support in the era of segregation.

Satin, TX

On August 20, 1865, sixteen newly emancipated men and women gathered on a Brazos River plantation to form their own congregation, first called Buhl's Quarters Baptist Church, meeting in a log cabin. As floods, growth, and finally the stripping of nearby land for gravel forced repeated moves, the church was renamed Rock Dam and then Cedar Grove, carrying with it a bell given in 1890 that still called worshippers when the congregation built anew in Satin. Local memory even recalls a brother summoning members to service with a bugle.

Trinity, TX

Cedar Grove Cemetery received its first documented burial — that of Phebe A. Martin — in 1875, three years after the town of Trinity was surveyed. Nearly 100 of its graves date to the nineteenth century, many from a devastating diphtheria epidemic in 1897-98. A cemetery association chartered in 1914 has cared for the grounds, which hold the town's founders, business leaders, and veterans of the U.S. armed forces.

Burkeville, TX

After the Civil War, a group of freedmen founded the Cedar Grove community here to take advantage of the area's strong cotton market, naming it for the cedars they cut for lumber. At its heart stood the Cedar Grove Community Church, organized with help from the Spears Chapel congregation, which also housed the community's first school. River-transport losses in the 1880s, followed by disease and floods, drove the settlement's decline, leaving the church and cemetery as its enduring markers.

Silver, TX

Stock-farming homesteaders settled the Cedar Hill area around 1890, naming it for a nearby cedar-covered rise and building a one-room school in 1891 near the cemetery that still remains. No town ever took hold — drought and hardship drove many families away by 1904, and the school closed after 1917. Three decades later an oil boom swept the county, and the once-emptied land came to sit within one of West Texas' largest oil fields.

Rusk, TX

Established in 1847 as Rusk's city cemetery, Cedar Hill sits atop a forested hill named for the massive cedars shading its oldest, northern section. It holds the graves of the town's prominent founding families alongside those of early pioneers, including the Cobbles—typical of families who traveled through early Texas during westward expansion—whose descendant Dr. Thomas H. Cobble led Rusk Memorial Hospital in 1949. War veterans from the Confederacy through the Spanish-American War, both world wars, and Korea and Vietnam lie beneath markers ranging from ornate obelisks to stone tree-trunks and a brick crypt.

Salado, TX

The first settlers along the Lampasas River basin were veterans who took land grants after Texas independence and stockmen seeking grassland for their herds. This cemetery below Cedar Knob Mountain grew from an 1858 homestead burial and a donation of land by Silas Burks in the 1870s, gathering pioneers who arrived by wagon caravan from as far as Missouri. In 1965 the Army Corps of Engineers relocated it and nine other cemeteries here ahead of the Stillhouse dam, consolidating burials dating to the late 1840s.

Loop, TX

Known also as Laguna Sabinas, this largest of the plains' alkali lakes was long an Indian camp and burial ground, and by tradition the birthplace of the great Comanche leader Quanah Parker. In October 1875 it was the scene of a skirmish between Native fighters and U.S. Cavalry under Lieutenant John L. Bullis, one of the closing clashes as the Comanche were driven from the Llano Estacado. Water, refuge, and memory converged at this remote West Texas lake.

Brazoria vicinity, TX

Built in 1861–62, the Cedar Lake Salt Works supplied a resource the Confederacy could not do without — salt to preserve meat for its armies and civilians. In November 1862, Federal landing parties from Gulf ships raided the works, destroying buildings, kettles, and boilers and ruining stored salt. When they struck again the next day at a nearby plant, Texas cavalry and Moseley's Battery of the 7th Texas Artillery Battalion drove the raiders back to their boats.

Galveston, TX

In 1926, as Galveston recovered from the great storm era and reinvented itself, the Moody family—one of the island's wealthiest business dynasties—created Cedar Lawn as a planned residential enclave for family members and company officers. Its designers deliberately broke from Galveston's rigid grid, weaving in a circle, semicircles, and a shared central garden, with houses turned inward for a sense of retreat. Deed restrictions, curated architecture in Tudor, Mediterranean, and Colonial Revival styles, and streets owned by the residents themselves made it one of the city's most distinctive neighborhoods, recognized on the National Register in 2002.

San Saba, TX

This cedar log structure served more than a century ago as stables on the Charles Harris ranch along Cherokee Creek south of San Saba, built sturdy enough to keep horses from being stolen in the raiding days of the Texas frontier. Preserved as the Cedar Log Cabin Museum, it was given in memory of Eula Gray Kuykendall by her husband and children. The building stands as a rare survivor of early ranch life in the county.

Cedar Park, TX

In 1873 George and Harriet Cluck bought a swath of cedar- and limestone-rich land in Williamson County, and their ranch became the seed of a community first called Running Brushy, where Harriet served as postmistress. The railroad's arrival in 1882 renamed the town twice before 'Cedar Park' stuck, and Cluck opened a yard selling the cedar posts then in demand for barbed-wire fencing. The town faded in the early 20th century but boomed again in the 1970s as Austin's growth spilled north, and Cedar Park incorporated in 1973.

Cedar Park, TX

George and Harriett Cluck settled this Williamson County land in the early 1870s, just after returning from a cattle drive up the Chisholm Trail, and built a log home that helped anchor the growing community. When their infant grandson Emmett died in 1901, they set aside part of the farm as a family burial ground, formally deeded as a community cemetery in 1912. The Clucks lie here among family and neighbors.

Houston County, TX

Formally organized in July 1885 around a newly built sanctuary, the Cedar Point Church gathered under Presbyterian circuit preachers who placed a strong emphasis on Christian education, music, and revivals. As membership dwindled, the congregation dissolved around 1946, but its adjacent cemetery—begun with the 1891 burial of Sam Houston Rice—endured. A cemetery association has cared for the grounds ever since.

Stephenville vicinity, TX

Founded about 1860 as Elm Grove School in a nearby log cabin, the Cedar Point School moved to this Erath County site after J.J. Davidson donated three acres in 1894. The one-teacher schoolhouse served 40 to 50 students and survived being wrecked by a windstorm in 1908 and burned in 1928, only to be rebuilt each time. Long a gathering place for the surrounding area, it was deeded to the community after the school closed in 1948.

Dallas, TX

Cedar Springs is remembered as the earliest known historic site in Dallas County, visited in 1840 by Colonel William G. Cooke while scouting a route between Austin and the Red River. A community by the same name, founded in 1843 by Dr. John Cole, grew so quickly that it challenged Dallas for the county seat in the 1848 election. The land was finally annexed to Dallas in 1929.

Dallas, TX

Surveyed in the late 1830s during preparations for a military road, the Cedar Springs area drew Dr. John Cole and his family in 1843 under a Peters colony land grant. Cole built a home and store near the springs, and a small community with a distillery, flour mill, and grist mill grew up around them. After Dallas was chosen county seat in 1850 the town faded, later revived as the suburb of Oak Lawn and absorbed into Dallas between 1920 and 1940.

Rosebud, TX

Tucked into the Robertson Colony country of rural Falls County, this burial ground holds its earliest marked grave from 1874, though at least twenty people were laid to rest before the land was formally deeded in 1901. Most early burials cluster inside the fenced plot of surveyor and colony attorney J. G. W. Pierson, suggesting it began as a family ground; among those resting here are Civil War soldiers who lived out their later years on the Texas prairie.

Tyler, TX

This congregation grew from a Sunday School begun in 1887 in a new suburb north of Tyler, formed to serve families living away from the town's central Methodist church. Organized as a congregation in 1888 under the Rev. Lacy Boone, it built its first sanctuary in 1889 and took the name Cedar Street in the 1890s. Through new sanctuaries in 1916 and 1948 the church stayed closely woven into the changing fortunes of its neighborhood.

Bay City, TX

The Cedarvale Cemetery began in 1896 with a tragedy — the death of Rufus A. Mathis in a hunting accident, one of the very community leaders then working to establish a burial ground near Bay City. Landowner D. P. Moore formally deeded four acres that March, and by 1906 a cemetery association had formed to tend and enlarge the grounds. Many of Bay City's earliest settlers rest here.

Kaufman, TX

Established around 1850 near the town of Kaufman, Cedarvale Cemetery dates to the first wave of Anglo settlement in the blackland prairie of North Texas, when the young state was drawing farming families westward. Its recognition as a Historic Texas Cemetery marks it as an enduring record of that founding community.

Lakeside Village vicinity, TX

In the 1850s settlers moving west were drawn to the fertile bottomlands along Cedron Creek in northeastern Bosque County. Among their first shared projects was a one-room cedar schoolhouse that doubled as church and gathering place, later rebuilt in frame and finally consolidated away in 1938. The community cemetery nearby holds its oldest marked grave, that of schoolteacher J. T. Hungerford, who died of tuberculosis in 1880; today the graveyard and a foundation are the last traces of a once-thriving settlement.

Paducah, TX

The Cee Vee community grew up around 1926 on land once grazed by cattlemen Clairborne Varner and Charles Goodnight, whose "C V" brand gave the place its name. As open range gave way to family farms, Cee Vee gained a cotton gin, stores, churches, and a school, while its prairie cemetery — tradition says it began with a cowboy buried near the old ranch house — took in the community's dead, including veterans of both World Wars. Renamed Haven of Rest by a local club in the 1950s, the burial ground is still tended by an association as a link to the area's ranching past.

San Marcos, TX

Cementerio del Rio lies on the San Marcos River near the site of the early Spanish settlement of San Marcos de Neve, on land deeded in 1893 for a church, school, and Mexican American burials. Most of its surviving stones date from 1910 to 1920, reflecting the wave of Mexican immigrants who arrived around the Mexican Revolution, and include the graves of four members of the Woodmen of the World. Eclipsed by a newer cemetery and nearly forgotten until the 1990s, it endures as a record of Hispanic San Marcos.

Del Rio, TX

Recognizing that Del Rio's Mexican Colony had no burial ground of its own, early land developer Paula Losoya Taylor Rivers donated four acres for a cemetery in 1884. A cross set atop the hill gave it its name, Loma de la Cruz, and among those laid to rest here are three former U.S. Army Indian Scouts and the first pastor of the town's Mexican American Methodist church. The last burial took place in 1933, and a cemetery association has since restored and maintained the grounds.

Austin, TX

Tradition holds that in 1912 a traveling family buried a child, María de la Luz, on this ground, and later that year three men purchased the land for use as a Mexican cemetery. A grass fire in the 1940s destroyed many of its wooden crosses and markers, and further graves were lost to development in the 1970s as Austin grew out to surround the once-rural site. What remains is a quiet link to the area's Hispanic community.

Lockhart, TX

Also known as the Mexican Cemetery, this burial ground has served Lockhart's Mexican American community since about 1900, with its earliest dated grave, that of settler Severiano Sánchez, marked 1901. Community leaders, business owners, laborers, ranchers, teachers, and veterans dating to World War I rest here, many beneath the tree-shaped Woodmen of the World monuments that gave it another local name. In 2005 descendants formed an association to restore the grounds and renamed it for Tejano statesman and Texas Declaration signer José Antonio Navarro.

Aransas Pass, TX

By local tradition George Lewis gave half an acre here in the late 1800s to the area's Hispanic families for a cemetery, on the condition that he be buried at its center. Hand-carved stones mark graves reaching back into the 19th century, among them children lost to a 1940 influenza epidemic and veterans of many wars, though wind and rain have worn many illegible. A statue of St. Anthony holding the Christ child, carried across the border from Mexico by a local priest, still watches over the grounds.

San Marcos, TX

Built around 1890 on land the Dixon family sold to the San Marcos Cemetery Association in 1876, this carpenter Gothic chapel has hosted funerals and memorial services for generations. Its cruciform plan, board-and-batten walls, and Gothic-arched openings make it a fine example of vernacular church architecture. Among those remembered here are veterans of the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and World War I.

Redwater, TX

Founded in 1840 by Republic of Texas pioneers Charles Moores and his wife Mary Harrison, this five-acre burial ground served the vanished town of Mooresville and its all-faiths chapel, where circuit-riding preachers once held services. About 100 graves lie here, including men who held Republic of Texas land grants, three sons who became Texas Rangers, and children of American Revolution soldiers. Restored in 1967, the cemetery is now the only trace of the community that once stood nearby.

Floresville, TX

This cemetery predates the church built in 1732 by Canary Island colonists who, led by Juan Leal Goras, arrived in 1731 to farm and raise stock in Spanish Texas. Their settlement, the villa of San Fernando, became the first organized municipality in Texas, and among the unmarked graves here lies the flamboyant Dona Maria Cavillo. The site is now owned by the county.

Gonzales, TX

Set aside in 1825 as part of the original town plan of Gonzales, this block became the resting place of some of the community's earliest residents. Among them lie Nicholas Peck, who fought at San Jacinto, and Daniel Davis, a veteran of the ill-fated Mier Expedition, alongside his wife Elizabeth. The square gathers the founders and soldiers of a town that stood at the center of Texas's fight for independence.

Lampasas, TX

Founded in 1883 on the centennial of American Methodism, Centenary College was Lampasas's first coeducational college, opening with 174 students and a 36-hour Christmas break. After the school closed in the 1890s, the Dominican Sisters reopened the buildings in 1900 as St. Dominic's Villa, a Catholic boarding academy for girls that former students remembered fondly. Anti-Catholic agitation by the Ku Klux Klan helped force the villa to close in 1925.

Corpus Christi, TX

Forbes Britton, a Virginian and West Point graduate, first came to Corpus Christi as an army captain during the Mexican War of 1846 and returned as a civilian to build this classical revival house in 1849–50. He ranched, ran a shipping firm, helped fight for a deep-water channel, and served in the Texas senate, even carrying Governor Sam Houston's word to President Buchanan in 1860. During the Civil War the house served as a hospital for Confederate and then federal forces, and it is recognized as the oldest surviving structure in the city.

Corpus Christi, TX

Built in 1938 to 1940 as part of Texas's celebration of a century of independence, the Centennial Memorial Museum rose in Corpus Christi's South Bluff Park with money from the state, the city, and local citizens. Its cramped 60-by-40-foot hall held a three-in-one collection of history, art, and science, from cattle brands and ship models to geology and a growing gallery of art. After World War II the history and science exhibits moved on and the building became the Centennial Art Museum.